A Short History – Betsy Green

A Short History

My work explores landscape, particularly in remote regions of the world, and centres on my longstanding fascination with exceptional trees and natural formations. I am drawn to places where the land feels charged with history, memory and something elemental that precedes and exceeds us. My photographs focus on the inherent power of landscape, and on our shifting relationship to the natural world. I research the evolving cultural construction of “landscape” itself, questioning how we perceive, idealise, and frame the environments around us. Natural light is central to this inquiry. The ever-changing quality of light, subtle or dramatic, fleeting or insistent, actively shapes the emotional register of each photograph. Light becomes both material and subject: its presence, intensity, and transformation structure the image from within, drawing out shadows, colours, and textures that might otherwise remain unseen. Working with natural light is a way of entering into dialogue with the land’s own rhythms, allowing the moment to declare itself. I seek out locations that feel timeless, or outside of time. I explore them physically, on foot, encountering the landscape as it exists now: not as myth nor as archive but as a lived and responsive being. Storytelling unfolds through the physical instrument of my nineteenth-century plate camera. This deliberate technology choice embeds slowness, attention, and non-instantaneity as a condition of both making and seeing. The analogue process amplifies chance and presence, each exposure engages a fleeting moment in which light, land and time align. The landscapes I choose to portray are never neutral backdrops. They hold meaning; they hold deep memory; they hold ecological and historical significance; and they maintain connection to a larger whole beyond the individual photograph. Each image is anchored in a specific site, yet each also gestures toward the long continuity of landscape and the extended timescales that shape it. Natural light deepens this reach, revealing what surfaces in that brief encounter and allowing that moment to endure.